A neuroscientist, mathematician, and expert on the hippocampus, Dr. Mark Cembrowski has a rare combination of skills. Now, at the start of a new year, he begins his career at the University of British Columbia with a newly established lab located in the Life Sciences Centre.

Necessity is the mother of invention, and Elisa York, a PhD student in Dr. Brian MacVicar’s lab found that in addressing a need in her own research she could solve a larger problem for other researchers studying microglia (the brain’s immune cells).

Scientists have long studied brain tissue in a search for the functional changes to the brain that accompany psychiatric disease. But the complexity of the brain presents challenges: the brain is made up of dozens of different types of cells. If researchers could inspect each cell type individually, they could gain greater insight into how the brain changes with psychiatric disorders including schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.

Parkinson Canada and Brain Canada announced this morning the creation of the Canadian Open Parkinson Network (C-OPN), including a $2-million Platform Grant that will support the initial development and maintenance of a large-scale research network in the field of Parkinson’s disease and related disorders. Brain Canada receives financial support from Health Canada through the Canada Brain Research Fund.

New research by Dr. Alex Rauscher, an MRI physicist and Canada Research Chair in Developmental Neuroimaging, has shown that about half the blood vessels in the brain's white matter run in parallel with nerve fibres.